Moreton-in-Marsh
A handsome market town on the old Fosse Way, with a great Tuesday market and a mainline rail link to London.
A handsome market town on the old Fosse Way, with a great Tuesday market and a mainline rail link to London.
Moreton owes its long, generous High Street to the Romans, who drove the Fosse Way in a dead-straight line from Exeter to Lincoln. The town grew up along that route and kept the width, so there is a sense of openness here that we don't always find in the Cotswolds. We tend to think of Moreton as the practical north-Cotswold hub: a place with a proper market, a mainline station and enough shops to actually get things done, wrapped in the same honey-coloured stone as everywhere else. It is about thirty to thirty-five minutes from Well Cottage by car, up through Chipping Norton.
If you can, come on a Tuesday. The town has held a market charter since 1227, and the weekly street market is now the largest open-air market in the Cotswolds, with a couple of hundred stalls running the length of the High Street. You will find everything here, from local cheese, bread and cut flowers to plants, tools, fabrics, cheap socks and the sort of vintage odds and ends you never knew you needed. It draws coach parties and gets genuinely busy, so we always aim to arrive by mid-morning for the freshest produce and the easiest parking, then have coffee somewhere and let the crowds do their thing.
Even on a quieter day, Moreton rewards a wander. The Redesdale Hall, the handsome Grade II-listed hall standing on its own in the middle of the High Street, is the town's landmark and its gathering place for concerts, fairs and community events. At the Oxford Street corner sits the sixteenth-century Curfew Tower, still with its original clock and bell that was once rung each evening to tell the townspeople to cover their fires. Around them, independent shops, tea rooms, delis and a good handful of pubs line the wide pavements, easy to graze along for an hour or two.
A mile and a half west of Moreton, out towards Bourton-on-the-Hill, two of our favourite days out sit side by side. Batsford Arboretum holds one of the largest private tree collections in the country across fifty-odd acres, spectacular in autumn when the Japanese maples and cherries turn, and worth the trip in any season for the magnolias and the long views over the estate. Sharing the same entrance, the Cotswold Falconry Centre flies eagles, hawks, owls and falcons in daily demonstrations, home to around a hundred and fifty birds of prey. We tend to pair the two: a slow morning at the market, lunch, then trees and flying birds through the afternoon.
The drive from Well Cottage runs north through Chipping Norton and takes about thirty to thirty-five minutes. There is parking off the High Street and around the town, though on Tuesdays it fills early and the streets themselves get busy, so it pays to arrive in good time or come on foot from the station side. If you would rather leave the car behind entirely, the train down to Oxford or on to Paddington is a genuinely pleasant way to do a day in London and be back for dinner. For a longer outing, Chastleton House, one of the most complete Jacobean houses in England, sits just a few miles east on the way home.
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.